


Perdition

by cristianoronaldo



Category: Football RPF, Sports RPF
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-31
Updated: 2014-08-31
Packaged: 2018-02-15 11:59:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2228217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cristianoronaldo/pseuds/cristianoronaldo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>high school students. summer study abroad program in Italy. see notes for trigger warnings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Perdition

**Author's Note:**

> TRIGGER WARNING: SEXUAL VIOLENCE. DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES READ THIS IF IT WILL TRIGGER YOU. PLEASE DON'T DO THAT TO YOURSELF. 
> 
> also sorry for typos this was written in 2 hrs

"The beast that thou sawest was, and is not"

Revelations 17:8 

 

He remembered dark eyes and dark words, and nothing but the feel of the burned city under his skin. The feel of a hand at his neck and a bruise forming. Of stumbling back to his hotel late at night, of muttering the words over and over again, the name of his hotel, his telephone number, Florence, Florence. His next destination.

 

His newest salvation came in the form of a corner. They were walking back from where The Event took place, and Fernando was falling over himself, and he couldn’t remember a goddamn thing. He was like a little broken bird at the side of a predator.

 

“Albergo,” he began, and his -- that monster pointed. Around the corner. Hotel.

 

He couldn’t find it, couldn’t find it. Walked forward to plant a kiss on the monster’s lips because he didn’t know any better. He didn’t remember the hand at his neck or the way he was crying to. Stop. Stop it now. Do people not understand the value of the word No?

 

He walked to the end of the street and looked back. The monster remained.

 

“It’s not here,” he said. “There’s nothing here.”

 

“Try around the corner,” he said in that inhuman voice.

 

He turned, blinked, and it was there. “Have a nice life,” he called over his shoulder and stumbled inside.

 

He unlocked his room door and fell onto the bed, asleep the minute he hit the mattress. It was an uncomfortable rest because every inch of his body was waiting for the numbness to leave and the pain to settle in. Every nerve was tingling with expectation. On the brink of the worst pain of his life, he lay sleeping.

 

The door opened and his roommates returned, and they rushed over. “You’re here-- you’re.” He couldn’t make out most of the words, too groggy and drunk and dead to the world. “Last we saw you went off with some guy.”

 

“He left. Found another one.”

 

“Another one? Did you-- what happened? Did something happen?”

 

They didn’t come too close to the bed yet.

 

“What happened?” one of them asked again.

 

There was a stretch of silence, and part of his brain recognized panic. His throat was on fire. “Everything,” he said finally, wrapping himself into a ball.

 

Faceless roommate. Too dark to see which one. “Everything? Oh my god.”

 

The other one gasped. This was very bad in his mind. Everything was very bad in his mind. God was coming to punish them all, blah blah blah. Fernando knew it. He was going to get shackles on his wrist so tight his hands might fall off. But this was the nature of things. They all fall into place, and the sinners are punished again.

 

“Did you at least use protection?”

 

“No,” he said with effort.

 

“No?” One of them sounded on the verge of tears.

 

“No,” he said brutally.

 

“Did he make you-- Are you.” Too difficult to make out the words, but he understood the question.

 

“Yes. No. I don’t know.”

 

Someone was crying. It could have been him. It could have been his roommate. Probably both of them at some point, and then his roommate was approaching his bed and holding him for just a moment, gasping when he looked and.

 

“Oh my god. Oh my god. Look at his face.”

 

“What’s wrong with my face?” He scrubbed at it. Dirty perhaps. He was so filthy that night. He wouldn’t have been surprised if the death of the city marked him.

 

Bruises, he heard.

 

“Oh yeah. He did that to my neck.” He clutched where it stung.

 

His roommates, they were talking, but he couldn’t understand a word. They told him to just sleep, and they would deal with it all in the morning, but he felt his heart in his throat, and he didn’t want to deal with it in the morning. He just wanted to sleep or, maybe, to die.

 

+

 

The next morning he reaquanted himself with his roommates. Sergio beside him in bed and Cristiano in the room next door. He knew them. He knew their fears.

 

He showered, looking at himself for a minute in the mirror. Sergio, beside him: “You need something to cover that up.”

 

“I know.”

 

He didn’t cover the bruise. A part of him wanted them to see. A part of him was too weak to save himself, and so he wanted someone to come up and say, Tell me about that bruise on your neck. Tell me about this haunted look in your eyes. And he would tell them that there had once been a time when he was untouched and lonely, if they could believe it. And there wasn’t that bruise on his neck or that look in his eyes.

 

He had breakfast outside with a view of the city. The day before, Siena had burned. This morning something had ravished it. Some beast had opened its jaws and blown fire, and Siena was no longer burning with some strange, otherworldly light. It was scorched dark brown and black and tan.

 

He was seventeen and destroyed, and it was his sister’s birthday. He thought about sending something about how his life had fallen apart, but he just sent Happy Birthday with a few dozen exclamation points instead.

 

He drank his coffee and opted for no breakfast. He remembered what Sergio had said before, “Sometimes when I get depressed, I forget to eat.” But it wasn’t about his memory. He couldn’t eat anything without wanting to vomit, whether it was a physical response or a mental response he couldn’t tell, but this mode of survival disgusted him, and he would wither instead.

 

Sergio told him he looked much better without the darkness covering him. Some of the bruises had just been shadows. It was okay. They were leaving. He would part from Siena, as lovers part in death.

 

The rhythm of Florence was different, and he was sick. He felt like he was in a daze. People speaking too loud or coming too close made him lurch backwards. He was no longer in control of his emotions, his thoughts, his feelings, his limbs, his anything. If he had anything left to call his own.

 

He could sense Sergio was stiff and probably angry that he had been so stupid. Angry that they had decided to part ways that night. They didn’t speak on the train and, when they reached their apartment, Sergio opted to stay there for the second half of the day rather than explore with Fernando and the rest of the group.

 

Fine. Fine, Fernando would leave. They would shop. He would see something, and he would forget.

 

But Cristiano had been there too, and when the rest of the group was exploring the piazza, he pulled Fernando aside and said, “Are you okay.”

 

He teared up, embarrassed. He didn’t cry. “I just didn’t think it would be that way.”

 

“You had to lose it sometime.” He didn’t understand. He hadn’t heard the whole story.

 

“I’m not talking about losing anything. I didn’t lose anything. And I know it had to happen sometime. I just didn’t think it would happen while I was crying and screaming and begging.” He stopped.

 

Cristiano embraced him. “God. I didn’t mean it like that. I’m so.” He fell short of sorry because sorry wouldn’t cut it. There is no apologizing for the destruction of a soul. There is only the destruction of a soul.

 

Their teacher approached from across the piazza, and Fernando lifted his elbow to wipe his tears. They walked. His teacher spoke: “Cristiano, go back to the apartment. Go with--”

 

The words were drowned out. He was back there. Staring at the white ceiling and feeling the weight of the bed shift. Suddenly, a looming figure above him with long fingers. Stroking his neck gently. “You’re too pretty to die” or maybe it was “You’re too pretty to live.” He doesn’t know if his survival was an accident or an act of mercy, if it could even be called that.

 

His teacher was calling his name, trying to bring him back to reality. He was stuck in that dark place a moment longer, reaching his hand forward, begging and not knowing what he was reaching for. Offering alternatives. No, please, not there. Do something else. Anything else. If you won’t leave me, at least pick a different part of me to damage. But he fell short again, and his eyes were opened, and his teacher was looking at him like he was crazy.

 

“Fernando,” he said. “I need an explanation.” And he proceeded to demand that Fernando explain the “hickey” on his neck, and the boy’s eyes filled with tears. “You have to call your mother or your father. You’re the only one on the trip who isn’t eighteen yet. They’re still responsible for you and I need them to know what’s going on. If you won’t tell me, tell them.”

He wanted to explain the whole thing and say, “This is all just a mistake. I swear I didn’t. This is all just. There is nothing romantic going on here. I didn’t find a boyfriend. I didn’t find an anything but a monster. Please just understand me,” but of course there was no one to listen to what he was screaming in his head.

 

“It’s not that,” he said weakly instead. “It’s a bruise. It’s--”

 

“That’s not a bruise. That’s what a hickey looks like.”

 

“It’s a thumbprint,” he said, but it was met with nothing but disbelief. Perhaps an ounce of disappointment.

 

“Call your mother.”

 

Just the sound of the piazza.

 

“Do you think she’ll be mad?”

 

He met his teacher’s eyes solidly for the first time. “No,” he choked. “Not when she hears what happens. She won’t be mad at me.”

 

There was a stab of realization in the older man’s eyes, and Fernando wondered, How did he guess? Then, Sergio. But he brushed it away.

 

The walk of shame all the way back to the apartments. Walking on fire would have been easier. He was embarrassed and half-crying the whole time. He never cried. Who took his place? He must have been murdered the night before, and someone else was wearing his flesh.  

 

He sobbed on his bed for an hour, and his roommates left him alone except for Cristiano who entered once to hold him while he cried. He stopped later and dressed and looked in the mirror to smooth where the tears had fallen.

 

He looked into the depths of his own eyes in the mirror, and he was back in that place. He had walked there because he wanted to. He had spilled wine on the carpet. Was he dancing? There was a piano in the corner and white marble steps.

 

“This is it. This is my room.”

 

“It’s nice.”

 

He was back in that place for what seemed like hours.

 

Then there was nothing inside of him, and he was staring at himself in the mirror again. Empty and somewhere between numb and almost passed out with pain, he wanted to break the mirror and grab a shard and cut himself open just to see what he was made of. Constellations like Sergio. Steel like Cristiano. Some quality that wasn’t filth.

 

Do you understand what you are now? he asked the boy in the mirror. You are no longer the boy in the mirror. You are this type of person in this special category, and you are a victim. Don’t you understand that you’re that nasty V word, and what you wrote in your diary-- “He didn’t. He was just an asshole.” Maybe that was true and you can wipe yourself clean.

 

He didn’t lie to his mother like he was planning on doing. He should have said something like, “I found someone and everything happened. We fucked. I’m sorry.” Instead he said that something happened, and he started crying, and she was yelling, so cold and so scared.

 

“What happened, Fernando? Tell me what happened to you. Did it involve a boy?”

 

Boy implies harmless. It didn’t involve a boy or a man or anything of this world. It was a monster. He only cried harder.

 

“Did someone- hurt you? Did he--”

 

He couldn’t hear the word, and he just cried harder and harder until every inch of him was stabbing pain and guilt. He just wanted to cry blood and drain himself. Hang the empty skin on the wall and make it teach a lesson. But he was both more and less than a lesson. He could never hang his own skin on a wall and pretend to understand what he had learned. He had only learned unimaginable pain, and his empty skin was likely to tell the same sad story.

 

Poor boy. Poor boy. The chorus of sympathy. A perfect symphony of sorrow.

 

She would make the arrangements. He should get some sleep. He hung up and closed his eyes, only to return. There was a gate in front of the dark place. He thought he remembered a gate. A friend. Someone had offered him wine. Here is where the rest of the cast appears. It is not just a show with a boy and a monster. The actors must take stage.

 

“You want some?” The friend held up the wine and exchanged a look with the monster. So much is in a single glance. So much is in a cup with wine and a little poison.

 

He was back in bed, crying so hard he couldn’t produce a tear.

 

+

 

The next morning Cristiano and their teacher took him to the hospital. Sergio was keeping his distance. They all sat together in a room with the doctor and a nurse. She folded her hands on the desk in front of her, and this was a difficult thing. They wanted to know.

 

“First of all, I am so sorry that this thing has happened to you.”

 

Me too. But he didn’t speak a word. His new vow of silence in place of chastity.

 

“Can you tell us what happened.”

 

His expression tightened at once. He snapped shut like a box, and his teacher grabbed Cristiano’s arms. “Okay,” he said, “Do you want us to leave.”

 

He nodded, and then it was just him and the doctor and The Kit.

 

“I have to know what happened in order to treat you.”

 

She would have to drag it out of him, but eventually the story would come. He cried a little but not too hard. He was brave, they told him, but he just felt shaky and alone.

 

They tested him next, and the minute they started to-- He tried so hard to be brave. He just didn’t want to be any trouble, and he wanted this nightmare to end, but it kept coming back. He kept going back. That dark place never died.

 

He cried hard again after that, and they stepped back. They couldn’t inflict that pain. They wanted to save, not destroy, and he wanted to tell them that they were not hurting him. It was that dark place that would not die.

 

They sedated him, and oblivion took hold. They would wake him every few hours for this thing and that. One time it was to stab his arm with a needle, another to draw blood. Then the pills came and finally the questions about how he was feeling. Bad. Very, very bad.

 

They moved him when he could stay awake for more than a few minutes at a time. They had him stand, very carefully, and move to a wheelchair. He hid his face when they passed his teacher in the hallway.

 

“I’m so sorry,” he cried.

 

“You have nothing to apologize for. This is not your fault. Listen to me, this is not your fault.”

 

He turned away. He hid his face from the mirror in the elevator.

 

His teacher left after that because he needed to help the others settle in. “But we’ll be back later. We’ll visit.”

 

Fernando wanted to be alone, but he thanked him anyway. It was nice, in theory.

 

His new roommate was a Roman man who immediately asked, “Why are you here?”

 

Fernando stiffened like a board, and the nurse behind him shook her head. She said something in Italian that he couldn’t understand. She helped him into bed and told him to get some rest. The Roman man translated everything with ease and concern.

 

“I’m sorry. I will not ask again.”

 

But Fernando drew forth the paper the doctor had printed off. The one with his story. He had a brutal name for it, but he couldn’t speak it, even in his mind. The paper. Omitting the all-important word. The what paper? Can you say what happened to you? No. Silence.

 

He handed the paper over to his roommate. “You asked what happened to me.”

 

He read it. There was pity in his eyes. Folded it up again and handed it back. The same old exhalation of sorrow. “I’m sorry.” But then something new in broken English: “You will forgot.”

 

“Yeah,” he agreed, but the minute the lights were out, he was back in that place again.

 

+

 

When Sergio finally came to visit, he hated himself. He told Fernando how he was the one who went to their teacher, and he tried to make everything better. He was just trying to help because that bruise and that pain.

 

“I was just trying to take care of you. The way I should have the whole time.”

 

Sergio’s guilt was nothing. It was pain. It was valid. It counted. Et cetera. But that was a brief lifetime, a moth fluttering on the wings of the wind. His pain was just a tiny struggling creature compared to the hurricane raging within Fernando. He wasn’t a boy who felt pain. He was warped. Twisted. Human no longer.

 

They would fly home soon with their souvenirs: Sergio with his Venetian glass and Fernando with his Thumbprint.

  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> just to make this clear-- i am not religious, but religious imagery is really easy to write imo because i've grown up going through catholic schools all my life. the references are just the easiest thing in the world.


End file.
